Morten Jerven's Poor Numbers established direct contact with statisticians or stakeholders in 23 of the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, by unstructured interview in seven of them from 2007 to 2010 and by a survey of national income accountants in the rest, and concerns the allocation of scarce resources as well as development knowledge
Claim ID
INTRO-006
Exact or summary claim
Morten Jerven's Poor Numbers established direct contact with statisticians or stakeholders in 23 of the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, by unstructured interview in seven of them from 2007 to 2010 and by a survey of national income accountants in the rest, and concerns the allocation of scarce resources as well as development knowledge
Destination
Introduction and Chapter 2
Status
SUPPORTED
Source
Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers, Cornell University Press, 2013
Source type
Book, read
Published
2013
Accessed
2026-08-10
Measure and scope
Direct contact established with statisticians and/or stakeholders in 23 of 48 sub-Saharan countries, by unstructured interview in seven and survey of national income accountants in the rest. Ghana rebased to a 2006 reference year in 2010, reclassified by the World Bank in 2011
Known conflict
The book's own counts do not reconcile in the extracted text: the chapter 4 country list names seven plus fifteen against a stated 23, and chapter 1 gives three plus eighteen of 23. May be an extraction artefact. Check against the printed page before using. CORRECTED 11 August 2026 against the document, on the battery review's m2. This cell previously read 'in 23 of the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa between 2007 and 2010', which dates the whole contact programme. The book does not. Chapter 4, page 102, verbatim: 'My survey was based on unstructured interviews with statistical officers and important stakeholders in offices in Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Malawi from 2007 to 2010. This was supplemented with a survey of national income accountants in Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Guinea, Lesotho, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Namibia, Mozambique, Niger, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, and South Africa.' The date governs the interview limb; the survey limb carries none. DOWNSTREAM EFFECT: none on the prose. The figures pass read this cell and reported the chapter wrong; the chapter was right and this row was wrong, so the correction runs from the register to the review rather than to the book. Introduction v9 line 89 is unchanged. THE COUNT CAUTION BELOW IS NOT DISCHARGED and is now sharper: the interview list names seven countries and the survey list fifteen, which is twenty-two against Jerven's own stated twenty-three, in the same sentence. The extracted text cannot distinguish a dropped name from a miscount in the printed book, so the chapter continues to report Jerven's own twenty-three and this caution stands until someone checks the printed page. Separately, page 1 dates a wider activity, interviews at statistical offices, central banks and donor missions, to 2007 to 2011 across eight research-visit countries including Botswana; the chapter follows the chapter 4 method statement, which is the passage carrying the 23-of-48 claim
Specialist
None
Downstream
Issue 4 and the Chapter 2 literature position
Action
Do not deny Jerven the resource-allocation limb when differentiating this book from his